Misinformation Index on Australian news media reporting of climate solutions

Climate Communications Australia concluded a study of 2255 climate solutions news articles, published over a one year period across 22 of Australia’s most read news outlets, and found 13.79% of articles contained misinformation.

 • To ensure the highest rigour in labelling misinformation claims, this study used the taxonomy developed by Coan et al. (2021). Their taxonomy covered climate denial claims, over a 20 year period, through reading and coding thousands of randomly selected paragraphs from documents drawn from contrarian think tanks and blogs. The process yielded a cluster of 19 sub-claims under the superclaim that ‘solutions won’t work’, which was shown to be establishing itself as the dominant claim of the 2020s. To these claims, CCA researchers added an additional claim of ‘Gas is cheaper, better value’ which was found to be prominent is the Australian sample of news articles.

• The study extracted 11,232 articles from the 22 most read online media outlets covering climate solutions topics in Australia between 1 October 2023 and 1 October 2024.

• A very high sample of one in five articles were coded, accounting for 2255 articles dealing with climate solutions.

• Coding was done by 5 coders and an inter-rater reliability check was used to ensure the coding was reliable.

• Further, every coded misinformation article was confirmed or discarded by a second coder.

• The articles were captured using three of the world’s largest News databases and API’s: Factiva, WorldNews.API and Newsdata.io.

• The articles were scraped using an OR cluster of proven Boolean search terms, consistently applied in each database.

In the sample, 29% of articles contain misleading claims that nuclear is cheaper or better value, 19% held that renewables were increasing costs with little benefit, 10% claimed that solar farms and wind power degraded the landscape, or offshore wind would harm whales. A further 10% held that clean energy is inherently unreliable or too hard to install. In the sample, 7% of articles selectively focused on very small cases of local opposition to clean energy, without looking at local support for renewables or comparing such support to support for nuclear of coal-fired installations. A further 7% claimed that ‘gas is essential’ as a ‘clean’ form of a firming technology, whilst ignoring the role of storage for firming. Most misleading were claims that gas would be indispensable even after an energy transition to Netzero.